Floriano Bodini

Floriano Bodini was born in Gemonio (Varese) in 1933. After specializing in art subjects in secondary school, he attended the Accademy of Brera, guided by Francesco Messina. In the middle of 1950, with Guerreschi, Vaglieri, Romagnoni, Ceretti, Ferroni and Banchieri, he was a member took of the Milanese group of young artists, called Essential Realism. His works express the uneasiness and the anxiety of existence, particularly in his portraits, which are daily news of great expressive power and drama. Since his debut he has been participating to very important public art exhibitions, in Milan, Rome, New York, Pittsburgh, Hamburg, Lisbon, Madrid, Cologne, Hannover, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Bonn, Antwerp, Darmstadt. In 1962 he was invited to XXI Biennial Exhibition of Art in Venice, where he exhibited seven works. In 1968 he showed the memorable sculpture "Portrait of a Pope", made with wood of Swiss stone pine, which aroused lively interest and was then collocated in Vatican Museums. The sculptor has also a great graphic activity, of which in ´73 is published the first general catalogue "a pitiless diary" edited by Enzo Fabiani and in those years began a series of bronzes that built up the "restless biography" of domestic affections. He taught at the secondary school of art and at the Academy of Brera when he was very young, than at the Academy of Carrara, of which he was the director until 1987 and president from 1991 to 1994, while he had a vital and never academic relationship with the education of young people, which would be always with him for the rest of his life. He left the teaching in Carrara to hold the chair of sculpture to the Polytechnic of Architecture of Darmstadt from 1987 to 1998. Since 1970, after wood and bronze, he has been enlarging his research to the use of marble, essential material for the cycle of great public works that would begin in ´80. He first worked in the Carrara study and then in the Viggiù one. Among his monumental works we remember the marble monument in Virgilio (Brindisi), the bronze memorial to Paolo VI (Sacro Monte of Varese), the marble monument of Candoglia to Paolo VI (Milan Cathedral), the high altar of Varese Cathedral, the monument to Cardinal Ferrari in Parma Cathedral, the complex of the high altar of the Loreto shrine Saint House, the marble memorial to the fallen in work in Carrara, the high altar of the Rho sanctuary, the altar of Vatican Grottos in S.Peter´s Basilica (Rome), the flight of doves in bronze for Agip offices of S. Donato Milanese, the memorial to Stradivari in Cremona, the bronze complex of Seven of Gottinga for the place of Parliament in Hannover(Germany), the Saint Door for the S.Giovanni´s Basilica in Laterano (Rome), The Altar of Eucharist to San Giovanni Rotondo in Renzo Piano´s architectonic complex, the memorial to Paolo VI in Aula Nervi in Vatican and the door of S.Vincenzo de Paoli´s Church in La Martella (Matera). In 1999, in Gemonio, opened the Civic Museum "Floriano Bodini". He donated a lot of his works and other contemporary´s and a considerable collection of books. He died in Milan the 2nd July 2005. The 2nd November 2007 Milan gave him the honour of the Famedio in Monumental Cemetery as he was a citizen who took part to the history of the city.

Lithography